


Cover Your Ass

by Fwee



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27329866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fwee/pseuds/Fwee
Summary: On Halloween night, Taylor and her friends decide to get some revenge on Principal Calvert.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Cover Your Ass

_You’re recording this? Okay. I guess._

_I should probably start at the beginning. Me and the others, we met in detention; we all go to the same school. I know how it looks, but we’re not bad people. We- I haven’t committed any crimes or anything, it’s just that I don’t get along with some others in my grade and they’re always getting me in trouble, so I ended up spending a lot of time around them. Not the- yeah, the ones here._

_Principal Calvert? Well, okay, so it wasn’t my idea. I don’t- didn’t have anything against him, he was actually the chemistry teacher at my school before he was principal, and I liked his class. He was the no-nonsense type that made it hard for troublemakers to get away with stuff, so yeah. But then the old principal got fired, and- huh? Oh, uh, Piggot. Principal Piggot. They wouldn’t tell us why, but I saw in the newspaper that she was facing jailtime, so it was probably pretty serious. Embezzlement, or something. But yeah, Calvert was kind of a hardass as a principal too, so the others weren’t a huge fan._

_I tried to talk them out of it, but one of them had already gotten the stuff for it, and if I didn’t go along with them, I couldn’t hold them back, you know? Me and… I’m one of the moderating influences, I guess. So I came along, even though I didn’t think it was a good idea. I mean, I thought he kind of deserved it? A little? If anyone had to get their house TP’d…_

\- - -

Lisa and Aisha were in good spirits, and even Rachel looked at-ease. Not me, though. It was stupid, but I just couldn’t get over the fact that the Halloween costume I’d spent months making would be unusable after tonight, like a new sportscar getting used as a getaway vehicle. Weeks of learning to sew for the bodysuit, a full month just making and gluing the little scales on, and it was all being reduced to just a glorified ski mask.

“Hey, chin up, Bugsy!”

I glanced over at Lisa. I didn’t bother correcting her- she knew the character I’d based my costume on was named Skitter- since I knew she was just trying to get a rise out of me. The problem was that it was working, and by the look on her face under the Groucho Marx glasses, she knew it too.

“We could still call this off,” I eventually said, my voice soft. It was already after dark, and the October chill was firmly established. Just walking forward felt like standing still in a sharp breeze and I was already regretting my choice to keep my costume slim by not adding padding or insulation.

“Fuck no,” Rachel growled. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”

Alec made an amused sound. “I’m surprised. Didn’t know you could get excited about shit.”

“Fuck off.”

We were moving into the neighborhood that Principal Calvert lived in, not too far from the rich, gated neighborhoods, but not quite a part of them either. There were lots of families with young children who went to the nearby elementary school, and we didn’t look too out of place among the minivans and herds of costumed kids coming back after their candy raids. Of course, we were six teenagers with masks that hid our faces, with only Brian and Rachel actually holding any bags, but hopefully the adults would be too tired and the kids too focused on their candy hauls to give us more than a passing glance.

Lisa had given us lectures after lectures about how to avoid getting caught, and the first rule was always “don’t act suspicious.” It sounded obvious, but all of the things that make you look suspicious were all of the things that you most wanted to do when you were doing something wrong- checking behind you, keeping track of others’ lines of sight, hurrying, and sneaking. So, we were just walking, not avoiding the pools of light under the street lamps or moving in any kind of rush. To the rest of the world, we were just a group of friends out enjoying the evening.

Despite myself, I felt my heart beat faster as a large red minivan came up the road from behind and slowed down as it passed us. The headlights felt like helicopter spotlights, throwing our clustered shadows across the nearest house so it looked like one giant creature with a dozen arms and legs and an amorphous blob for a head.

Luckily, it wasn’t an undercover cop, or someone who was going to roll down their windows to tell us off. They turned at the intersection just ahead of us and headed straight toward the end of the cul-de-sac, where a garage door was opening.

Principal Calvert didn’t have kids, did he? I couldn’t imagine it, unless they were tiny copies of him, suit and tie and everything. Sent off to school with their lunch in a briefcase, number two pencils in their shirt pockets.

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t see him being married, despite living in the kind of neighborhood that attracted families. It made sense for a teacher, but usually teachers had lives outside of school too. Mrs. Washington was married to a police officer, and that came up a lot in her current events class. Mr. Wallis apparently did some kind of robotics or tech competitions, and Ms. Ruthersford was really into gardening. Calvert didn’t talk about his personal life at all, and I’d never even heard any stories of people seeing him at the grocery store or at some event or something.

I was starting to think that this was a bad idea. Even if we didn’t get caught, this was the kind of thing that made hardasses like Calvert double down on their hardassery. He’d find some way to make life at school suck for everyone, just so he could be sure that the people who did it would be punished. Maybe we could have disguised that we were targeting him because we were his students if we went after other nearby houses too, but I wasn’t about to suggest that to the group, because they might actually agree, and I didn’t want that egg on my metaphorical hands. Or… literal hands either, I guess.

We arrived all too soon, grouped around Brian and Rachel’s bags on the yellowed lawn. Principal Calvert’s house was in the middle between two street lamps, so it was a little hard to make out small details, but his house looked basically like the others on the block; two stories, faded blue paint, fake white shutters framing the windows, a couple of old trees. He had weeds sprouting out along the edges of his house and along the driveway, which was surprising. I don’t know why, maybe I thought he’d be able to glare the weeds to death. More realistically, he’d always been so anal about things being neat and clean when he’d been a teacher that I’d have thought that he’d have the neatest lawn on the block at least. Maybe a principal’s salary couldn’t afford the same lawncare service as whatever everyone else here did. Looking around, I did notice a little sign stuck in most patches of grass, but nothing in Calvert’s.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Lisa said, startling me a little.

Brian spoke up, not quite cutting her off, “Rachel and I have the best throwing arms, so we’ll do the TP. Aisha, Alec, you’re on egg duty. Don’t hit the windows or anything that’ll make a loud noise. Taylor, Lisa, you’re the lookouts.” Of all of us, he’d probably had to do the least for his costume. A cheap skull mask over his motorcycle outfit made for a pretty good Ghost Rider- part of it was just that he had the physique for it.

“We already went over this,” Aisha groused, claiming a carton of eggs. “Don’t ruin this with all your alpha-male bullshit, I WILL crack an egg on your head.” She was wearing one of my earlier attempts at a bodysuit along with a white horned mask, making a decent likeness of the character Imp.

Lisa bumped her shoulder against Brian’s. “Hey, before we start this show, let’s all have a bit of fun. Throw out the first volley together, you know?” She plucked a pair of eggs out of Aisha’s carton and handed one to me. My fingers closed around it, the cold of the shell going through my glove like it was nothing.

Nobody objected, and soon everybody had their own eggs. I noticed that Aisha’s had a little sneering face and devil horns painted on. When had she had the time to do that?

I always got this little tingle in my spine, accompanying the knotting in my stomach, that always came when I was getting close to crossing the line from general hooliganism into actual crime. Each time, it felt like I was crossing a line, leaving some mark on a metaphorical stone tablet that could later be tallied up to label me a criminal. I knew the others were a bad influence on me, they were basically the definition of a ‘bad crowd’, but never in a thousand years would I give them up if it meant going back to how things were last year. Lisa, Brian, Rachel, Aisha, Alec, they were my friends, and I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with them. I didn’t enjoy the vandalism or theft as much, but nobody was perfect. And between Brian and me, we were able to stop the crazier schemes before they got too far.

When we loosed Lisa’s ‘first volley’, there wasn’t a freeze-frame or a long moment that hung in the air, like in the movies. We stood roughly in a line, and more or less at the same time, we threw our eggs at Principal Calvert’s house. Aisha’s wild throw went wide and smashed on the ground a couple of yards away, mine got lost in the bushes, and the others splattered lightly against the housefront.

Having dirtied my hands and exercised some classic teenage rebellion, I turned to my job within the group: keeping watch.

A curve in the road back in the direction we’d come from limited how far I could see from Principal Calvert’s front lawn, but I didn’t want to stray so far from the house that I wouldn’t be able to raise the alarm if someone did come. It was more likely that it would be a family coming home and we could take the chance that they wouldn’t get involved, but on the off-chance that a police car came by on patrol or responding to a call, we needed as much of a head-start as we could get to make our getaway. Brian had looked over the area on google maps, and had picked out a route cutting through backyards and over fences that would let us outpace someone in a car quick enough to lose their trail, but that required us to avoid being caught red-handed.

Unfortunately, being a lookout was very boring, and the cold didn’t help. When we’d been walking, at least the physical movement had warmed me up a bit, but standing still here, with the sweat trapped in the fabric of my costume, the chill in the air started soaking through my skin and down to my bones. Rubbing my arms didn’t work with the armor plates I had there, and I couldn’t exactly start warming myself up with jumping jacks when my goal was not to stand out.

Taking my eyes off the road for just a moment, I looked over my shoulder- a full-body production with my mask restricting my vision- and checked the group’s progress.

Half of Principal Calvert’s house looked like it had been infested by a swarm of spiders, or maybe just one massive one. Long strands of white trailed from tree branches and gutters, and as I watched, Brian tossed another roll of toilet paper on a high arc that just cleared the peak of the roof, unraveling as it went and leaving behind a twisting streamer that joined the others adorning the house.

Aisha and Alec, the dynamic duo of pranks, looked like they’d already gone through most of their supply of eggs. I couldn’t see very clearly where the eggs had actually landed except for where they met toilet paper, staining it a gross yellowish color and sticking it to the house.

I was starting to see why this was such a ubiquitous ‘trick’ to punish someone with. It was hard enough getting the toilet paper off without just ripping it and leaving a chunk up there, but once the egg-stained toilet paper dried, it’d be stuck fast to the house, and trying to wash the egg off would get the toilet paper wet and make it stick just as bad.

I turned back to the road and resumed my vigil. For a few minutes, the soft crack of eggs was punctuated by crackling from the plastic packaging of the toilet paper, and it was starting to seem like we’d be able to pull this off without a hitch.

And then the police car pulled around the corner at the end of the street.

Shit.

I spun on my heel and started moving. My eyes were adjusted to the well-lit street corner, so my friends all looked like person-shaped blobs in the darkness. “Everyone, we have to go!”

I couldn’t afford to be too loud, but they all heard me anyway. Brian stopped Aisha from throwing one last toilet paper roll, and we all made our way around the back of the house, leaving our remaining supplies behind. It wasn’t anything that could incriminate us, and it wasn’t like they’d notice the egg cartons and not the dozens of rolls of toilet paper on the house and trees.

You don’t really notice how flat and regular concrete is until you’re running across grass in the dark. Light from the other houses and the distant street lamps let me see the ground, but with the heavy shadows at steep angles, every other step was dipping just a little further than I expected, throwing me off. That would be just my luck, to twist my ankle at the very start of our getaway.

The police car’s headlights bathed the street in harsh light, though the fence between Principal Calvert’s house and his neighbor’s gave us some cover on our way to the back. Rachel stumbled, cursing under her breath as her boot seemed to catch on something, but before I could get to her side to help, she was already up and moving.

“Shit. Fuck.” Everyone came up short, grouped around the back fence. Lisa’s smartphone flashlight shone over a six-foot high wall of leaves, branches, and dangerous-looking thorns. “Of course he would have fucking prison wall hedges around his house. We’re lucky it’s not an electrified fence.”

There was some pretty high fencing around the back yard at my house, but this wasn’t just neglect, it looked deliberate. The thorny wall continued around the sides until it reached the house, where its height slowly decreased until it became the fencing I’d seen earlier. If we went back that far, we’d be seen.

“I can’t climb that,” I said, fighting down the panic, “my costume would get snagged on every inch. Aisha’s too.”

“We need to hide,” Brian said, cutting through the air with a decisive hand-swipe. “Stick to the shadows back here, wait until the car moves on, and then we sneak out. They’ll probably be on the lookout from here on out, so when we go, we have to be careful. Stealth over speed.”

“Quiet,” Rachel hissed. We all stilled for a moment, and the sound of creaking leather and wind whistling through toilet paper became deafening.

I glanced at Rachel, who still had a hand raised in the ‘stop’ gesture. I couldn’t hear anything, let alone whatever she was listening for. And then it hit me.

I couldn’t hear the engine of the police car. They weren’t just slowing down, they were coming to investigate.

We were fucked.

I looked around, searching desperately for options. The hedge-fence didn’t have any holes, there wasn’t a patch with handholds or anything. There wasn’t a shed or tarp or something we could use to hide, and on the house, there wasn’t anything. I took a few steps to the back door on the right side of the back of the house- there was a window, but it had curtains over it- and jiggled the knob. Of course, it was locked. On the opposite side of the back wall, there was a hatch door set into the foundation at an angle, the kind that led straight into a basement, but the double doors were held shut by a large lock.

We had to do something. The police officer would come and investigate, and we had nowhere to go. I looked to the others, hoping that maybe one of them had an idea. Aisha had moved closer to Alec, and Rachel was having a whispering argument with Lisa. Nothing. I took a shallow breath and spoke up. “Maybe he has a key hidden around here in case he gets locked out or something, everyone look under rocks, on ledges, anything.”

Alec squatted down near the hatch door and grabbed the lock, examining the keyhole. “I can’t pick this, but I could probably bust it open,” he said.

“Please don’t,” I whispered back. “I’d really like to limit the amount of ‘breaking’ in any ‘breaking and entering’ that we do tonight.”

“Better than getting caught,” Alec shot back, not really making any effort to lower his voice.

“Just… keep looking.”

Rachel was rooting around in the grass, and she caught my attention by holding up a small object between two fingers. I couldn’t quite see in the low light, so I got a bit closer.

“Got candy in his grass,” she said. The thing she’d found looked like a Jolly Rancher, a small hard-candy log of sugar and food coloring, wrapper and all. It was odd, sure, considering how high the barrier around Calvert’s yard was, but it wasn’t going to help us out of this situation.

Rachel pinched the twisted-off ends with both her hands and started pulling with a crinkle of plastic. I reached out- stopping myself just short of grabbing the candy, but earning a hard stare from Rachel regardless. I gave her a little apologetic shrug, but said “it’s Halloween candy. On the ground. That’s like three different flavors of bad idea.”

She grunted, and tossed it off to the side. “It was blue flavor too. Those suck.”

“Keep looking,” I said, and took my own advice, lifting a small rock and digging around below it with the clawed finger of my costume, in case he was using the stone as a marker for where the key was buried. No luck.

I was a bit surprised that we hadn’t been found out yet. I hadn’t heard the police car’s engine starting back up but I hadn’t heard-

_Biiiiinnn-donnnnnn_

And that was the doorbell. An upstairs light snapped on, though luckily the blinds didn’t open. I couldn’t quite hear Calvert making his way down to the front door, but I felt the time ticking down all the same. I ran my hands along the top of the back door’s frame, but all that I got from it was a couple of shriveled bug shells.

We might have to force the basement door after all, but that would just trap us down there, and Calvert would probably notice the snapped lock. Maybe if we pressed up against the house, the shadows would hide us? Maybe we could squeeze underneath the hedge?

Brian was rooting through the weeds, along the edge of the house, and I joined him. My costume’s claws dug easily through the thick growth, but I could feel them coming loose. That was the last thing I needed, to damage my costume and leave behind evidence.

“Hurry up!” Lisa hissed, off to the right side of the house, back on lookout apparently, “they’re coming!”

“We can go around the house,” I said quickly, “circle around, keep the house between us.”

“Nope,” to the left, Aisha was pressed against the house, clearly having just peeked around the corner. “We’re double-fucked.”

“Found it,” Rachel said, holding up a key. She nudged a grass-covered clump of dirt back into place; had she just been digging random holes?

I didn’t have time to ask, as I could hear the footsteps of the police officers and possibly Principal Calvert coming around the house. Six teenagers in mostly full-body costumes could only move so quietly, but this wasn’t the first time we’d been in a scrape like this, so there wasn’t any jostling or crowding as Rachel unlocked the back door and all of us filed inside.

I came in behind Lisa, the last of us in, and I eased the door closed, holding the knob so it didn’t rattle. I clicked the lock back to ‘closed’ and looked around for a hiding place.

The back door let directly into a kitchen, with a counter and hanging cabinets along the outside wall and a waist-high island spaced a few feet away. Brian, Alec, and Rachel had ducked behind the island, and I could still see Aisha’s gripping the door of the lower cupboard she’d crawled into. The refrigerator sat against the right wall, and I joined Lisa behind its far side. The lights in here were off, but light from other nearby rooms lit it enough to see; and enough to expose us if we were caught peeking out.

I turned to Lisa- we were pressed awkwardly close together, trying to make full use of the cover the refrigerator presented, but our masks provided a bit of a barrier- and I asked, “can we go out the front while they’re busy around back?”

Lisa shook her head and pointed to a small white box set into a wall visible through an open doorway. “The alarm on the front door is active. We have some kind of insane fucking luck that the back door’s wasn’t, since the instant we open an alarmed door, the system will wake the fucking neighborhood. Hell, I can’t tell from here if he has a silent alarm on the back door, so the cops might be getting a call about it any minute here.”

“But wait, didn’t he just go out the front door?”

Lisa took in a deep breath, thinking, and then let it out. “Maybe a code to silence the alarm for a short time, maybe he has a clicker, like with garage doors. I can’t be sure, and that means it’s too risky.”

Aisha stage-whispered, muffled through the cupboard door, “dude’s got Rad Rockets down here! I haven’t had that cereal since I was, like, eight.”

I fought the urge to shush her; at this distance, the people outside were just as likely to hear as she was. Which was why I really hoped she shut up on her own; Aisha was good at avoiding attention, but she was right between the door and a window set behind the sink, both of which could let her voice through.

Trying to distract myself from my rising panic, I quietly asked Lisa, “Does Principal Calvert have a kid? Or does he just really like cereal with pop rocks in it? I don’t know which option is worse.”

That got a laugh out of her, at least. “It’s stored by the sink, so maybe he got it for a visiting relative and left it somewhere out of the way afterward. People usually keep things like cereal in a drier location. Pantry, or high cabinet.”

“Enough chit-chat,” grunted Brian, and I realized that we had been talking more than Aisha, though we were both much quieter about it. My costume suddenly felt a lot stuffier. Brian continued, “we need a plan. Lisa, you said we can’t go out the front?”

“Not while the system’s still active. We could look through the house for somewhere he’s written down the code, but that’s riskier than just making a break for it.”

“Is there something in here that could help us get through the hedge in the back? Oven mitts we could use for climbing or something?”

Aisha, still in her little cupboard hiding spot, contributed, “dude’s got a bunch of weird chemicals in here. Weed killer and shit.”

I shook my head, not that she could see it; even if he had acid in a spray bottle, we probably couldn’t put a hole in the hedge fast enough to get through, and if we got caught doing that, we’d get a way worse charge than vandalism or whatever this was categorized as.

“What if we cut the power?” I asked Lisa. “If the security system is plugged in, wouldn’t that shut it down?”

“I don’t think that would do it,” she said. “Systems like this usually have a backup battery so stuff like your plan _doesn’t_ happen, but maybe if we timed it right… no…”

Her eyes narrowed, pupils flitting left and right as if trying to follow her racing thoughts. After a couple of seconds she said, slowly, “it might not switch off the security system, but… maybe it could work anyway. If I got my hands on his breaker box, I could probably make a distraction, draw their attention long enough for us to all get away.”

“Okay,” I said, forcing myself to keep my voice low, “so where’s the breaker box? I don’t even know where the one in my own house is.”

“Probably the basement,” Lisa said. “So our best bet is to use that door in the back yard. Looking for the stairs down on the inside has the same problems that looking for the security code does.”

“We can check if the house key works there too, I guess.” And then, raising my voice a bit, “Rachel, still have that key?”

“It’s mine. Just grab the one by the door.”

I peeked out, leaning on Lisa’s shoulder, and saw that Rachel was right; there were a pair of small hooks set into the wall by the door to the backyard, and one of them had a key hanging on it, suspended from a string. It was flatter and thicker than the housekey, which made sense if it was for the big lock out back.

I also noticed that I couldn’t see the police or Principal Calvert through the window, and there weren’t any moving shadows on the door’s curtains. I could just make out the faint sound of shoes crunching grass to my left, around the side of the house. They must have moved on.

“It’s clear. We need to go, now.”

It hadn’t felt especially warm inside, but as we moved back out, I got hit with just how cold it really was. Even without the wind, the air cut into me through the least covered parts of my costume. I checked around the near side, just to confirm that Calvert or one of the officers weren’t doubling back, while the others gathered around the hatch door.

My mask had shifted over the course of the night, and my abrupt attempt at peeking only shifted it more, so that I was only looking out of the top half of my goggles. I moved it back, but even with the eye holes aligned, my night vision wasn’t all that good. I didn’t notice any kind of movement in the shadows, but I could see an elbow poking out around the front of the house, clad in what might have been sleepwear or a robe. So, probably Calvert. He was just standing there, so I guessed that he was talking with the policeman.

I came back to the group with a hurried half-jog. Aisha was acting as a lookout again, and Alec was using some kind of cloth to muffle the sound of the lock while he opened it with a key.

“Okay, kiddos, here’s the plan,” Lisa said. “Me and Taylor go into the basement, find the breaker box, and fuck with the power. If I can figure it out, I’ll blow the lights out front. Alec, Rachel, you two go to the right side and see if anyone comes down that way. Brian and Aisha, you stay on this side. If they come around one way, we go the other. If they go down both, we go through the house and wait until the last second to make a break through the front door. Either way, make sure you let us know before you move. I’m not getting trapped down here.”

I tried rubbing my hands together for the heat but the claws on my costume clacked together and one fell off. Nobody seemed to notice, they were taking their places, so I quickly bent down and scooped it up, slipping it in one of the pockets in my little armor backpack. I hadn’t made my costume to do physical labor, it was supposed to be a fun thing to wear to a Halloween party or a Comicon convention if I ever got up the nerve to go. If I’d known I’d be breaking into houses and sabotaging circuits, I’d… well, I’d have stayed home.

Lisa lifted one of the hatch doors and, with a finger to her mustachioed lips, started descending. I took it from her and gently lowered it as far as the hatch would go before following after.

Descending into a dark basement on Halloween night felt like it should feature creaking wooden steps and a chilly breeze, but we didn’t make a sound and if anything, there was a bit of a warm gust coming out, flowing from the warmer basement to the cooler air outside.

The ambient light of the neighborhood had been enough to see in the backyard, but so little of it filtered down to us now. I could just make out the first two steps, but after that I had to go by feel; bringing my foot forward and down, moving backward until I bumped up against the current step, and then setting it down where I knew the next step would be. It didn’t help that they were pretty narrow and steep, so it felt like an inch of my toes were always over open air.

“Found a light switch,” Lisa whispered. The sudden sound made me jump, but at least I was prepared when the basement was bathed with electric light.

Principal Calvert’s basement was a concrete cube with a pair of doors on the far side, presumably to a boiler room or something. On the left, there was a stack of furniture that looked like it was being stored here; cabinets, a couple of chairs, with clear plastic covering them. I looked over the walls, but I didn’t see anything that I’d call a breaker box, just some exposed wiring connecting the overhead lights to the switch.

“Let’s see what’s behind door number one,” Lisa said, and I followed close behind as she went to the left door. It wasn’t locked, and when she pushed the door open, I could see over her head that the lights weren’t on inside. “Oh shit,” she said softly.

I nudged her shoulder. “Lisa? What is it?” Instead of answering me, she stepped forward into the room and a bit to the left so I could see for myself.

In the darkness, the room looked almost like it was in black and white. There was a simple, patterned wallpaper but the floor was still concrete. The only furnishing in the room was a metal stand with an empty drip bag standing next to a flat mattress. There was a little girl, maybe ten years old, lying on the mattress with a line from the bag leading to her arm.

“Fuck,” was all I managed to say.

“Hey!”

Lisa and I both nearly jumped out of our skins at the shout. My hair made an audible sound moving through the air at the speed I snapped my head around. I could practically feel my body kicking into fight-or-flight mode, and my heart chose to try to escape out of my throat.

For a single instant, I thought it was a demon standing there behind us, but my sense of reason caught up with me and I recognized it as Aisha in her Imp costume, immediately feeling stupid for getting so hopped up.

“What’s the hold-up?” she demanded. “They’re still out there, hurry up! I’m not gonna get caught because you two-” She paused. “Oh.”

Despite coming in last, Aisha was the first to shake out of the stupor we’d all seemed to be enthralled by. She headed straight for the other door, the one we hadn’t opened, saying something about seeing if there were any others.

“Who is she?” I asked, to nobody in particular. “She doesn’t look like him, probably not a relative. Did he fucking kidnap someone?” Was he planning to do something like this to us, or any other kids from the school who wouldn’t be missed much?

“From her condition,” Lisa said, “I think that’s heroin, or something close. A hundred to one, she’s being kept here as a lab rat.”

It was maybe because we were looking into the still-dark room that we both noticed the bright light behind us. I felt a bit numb, like this was a dream and I was a step removed from reality, but I had the wherewithal to turn to see what it was.

A dark silhouette stood about halfway down the stairs, backlit by a bright light that made it impossible to make out any details.

“Busted,” I muttered under my breath, though it didn’t feel like it mattered much anymore.

\- - -

_And that was you, obviously. We showed you the girl, and- yeah. Yeah, you know. I guess he was… testing drugs on her? I can’t even imagine…_

_…it’s… I’m dressed up as a character. Skitter, she controls bugs- yeah, no, it’s not important, sorry. It’s just, we thought we were just doing a prank, you know? It made sense to hide our faces, because-_

_No, I-_

_We didn’t-_

_Okay, so I know this looks bad, and yeah, I guess we did kinda… break in. But if it wasn’t for us, you never would have found whatever the fuck is going on here, right? You could just let us go, say you heard suspicious noises or something, right?_

_What if I-_

_Okay, fine._

_Fuck._

_Imp, the lights!_

_ Sorry, but you kinda forced our hands here. _

_Uh, bye!_

**Author's Note:**

> This was part of the Fic Spoops event on the Cauldron Discord, as a gift for Dusky. The prompt I chose was:  
> [Mundane AU] Taylor and her friends conspire to tp/egg Principal Calvert's house on Halloween.


End file.
